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Welcome to the 11th edition of The Bodyboard Report! 🤙

Here is something worth sitting with for a moment.

There was a time, not that long ago, when the only way to see elite bodyboarding was to find a shop that stocked a VHS, hand over thirty dollars you probably didn't really have, and hope the tape hadn't been rewound halfway.

No algorithm or short clips, or recommendation engine pointing you toward a clip.

You either knew about it, or you didn't. And yet, somehow, bodyboarding produced some of the most compelling action sports cinema ever put to tape or screen.

I’m talking films that built cultures, launched careers, created legends overnight, and gave a generation of prone and DK chargers a reason to believe that what they were doing mattered.

This is the short story of those films, starting from the beginning. 🤙

Long before anyone had a plan, an Aussie named Chris Stroh had a camera. The first Underground Tapes video dropped in November 1991, and Stroh himself described the concept behind the series of 10 films best:

"Nothing was planned. Just hit and run and shoot everything that moved vertical."

That was not a production philosophy. That was a mission statement. Stroh worked fast, moved constantly, and shot with an instinct for the moment rather than the setup. The Underground Tapes series became the essential document of 1990s Australian and Hawaiian bodyboarding, capturing a sport in full flight and a generation of riders who were rewriting what was possible on a prone board.

Titles like Waves from Hell, Reef Madness, Ballistic, Ocean Fire, and Seek and Destroy said everything you needed to know before you even pressed play.

The riders who appeared across those tapes, names like Mike Stewart, Guilherme Tamega, Michael "Eppo" Eppelstun, and the Cronulla Skid Kids charging Shark Island, became household names in the boog world largely because Stroh was there with a camera when nobody else thought to show up. He produced 10 films under the Underground Tapes name. Each one a time capsule.

Chris Stroh is widely regarded as a bodyboarding movie pioneer, and for good reason. He built the blueprint that everyone who followed either copied or reacted against.

By the mid 1990s, bodyboarding was large enough for a major brand to do something they had never really done before. Morey decided to make a proper film. Not a grassroots tape, but a real, big budget production. And they hired the man who had been shooting big wave surf cinematography since 1978 to do it.

Tim Bonython began his association with surfing films when, armed with a Super 8 camera, he set off to Hawaii's infamous North Shore as a young man and was immediately, completely, irreversibly hooked. He went on to become one of Australia's most celebrated surf filmmakers and directors. Morey brought him in to produce two bodyboarding films anchored around the annual Pipe Challenge and built around their team riders.

The result was RAW 1 and RAW 2, which stood for Repertoire of Aquatic Warfare.

What Bonython created was vastly different from anything the bodyboarding world had seen. It had the look and energy of a music video, with the production values of a proper broadcast film. Slick edits, thoughtful framing, a big world feel. It showed bodyboarding at Pipeline in a way that demanded you take it seriously.

In a world of hand held guerrilla tapes, RAW arrived looking like it had been sent from another dimension. If you were born this century, you may recognise Tim Bonython’s name from his renouned Swell Chasers surf series.

We gave No Friends the story it deserved in a previous edition of The Bodyboard Report 👉 Read it here.

But to place it in the timeline: when Brian "Stoker" Stokes dropped NF1 in 1998, it changed everything.

The music, editign and the attitude. The sheer quality of riding from Jeff Hubbard, Paul Roach and the whole NF crew. NF1 is still widely regarded as possibly the greatest bodyboarding video ever made.

And what No Friends built in terms of brand, culture, and global reach gave the sport a swagger it had never quite had before. The NF premier tours took that circus from town to town and bodyboarding grew louder wherever they went.

While Stroh was doing his thing out of Australia and Hawaii, the American bodyboarding film scene had its own defining series. ROT was produced by California's Fluidzone and ran across multiple volumes through the 1990s and into the 2000s, with at least 7 volumes documented including the Matter of Opinion series.

The ROT films represented the West Coast American bodyboarding scene at its peak and gave riders like Paul Roach a platform and profile that crossed borders. They sat firmly in the tradition of no budget, maximum commitment filmmaking, shot fast and real, at waves like The Wedge and across the Hawaiian North Shore, capturing an era of American bodyboarding that felt raw, proud, and unapologetic.

For a generation of California and East Coast riders, ROT was their Underground Tapes - The film series that told them what the sport could be if you just got in the water and got it on tape.

Chris White was not trying to make a serious bodyboarding film.

The original Tension series, 10 films released between 2000 and 2007, were described by Stab Magazine as "Scrappy, prank heavy documents of slab hunting and bad ideas that stitched hardcore bodyboarding together with a Jackass level disregard for consequences."

The films became cult classics on the fringe. And occasional public menaces. When the pranks spilled beyond the surf world and landed on Australian current affairs programs, framed as evidence of the nation's moral decline, the Tension brand became even more famous. Which was, naturally, only going to make it funnier.

Ryan Hardy, Sean Virtue, Brad Hughes and Chad Jackson became household names across the global bodyboarding world because of Tension. The riding was genuinely insane. The chaos around it made you feel like you were watching something you weren't supposed to be watching.

Chris White produced the whole thing on instinct. The first film was made in a week.

20 yearslater, he came back. Tension 11 arrived on YouTube in late 2025, shot across 5 years around Australia and the world, released free because that felt right, and landed with the same emotional force as the originals.

👉 Check ou the Tension Series on YouTube

A 9-year old French kid stands on an unremarkable Moroccan beach in 1999 and watches a man slide along the face of a wave on a piece of foam.

That is where Tender begins. Directed and filmed by Portuguese filmmaker Gustavo Imigrante in collaboration with Australia's Movement Mag, Tender is a 52 minute feature documentary on the life and career of 2 x World Champion Pierre Louis Costes.

It travels through ten chapters, each anchored to an iconic location in Pierre's journey, from Morocco to Hawaii, Australia, Portugal, Chile, the Canary Islands, Ireland and Indonesia.

What sets Tender apart from almost everything else in the bodyboarding film catalogue is what it is actually about. The riding is extraordinary. The locations are stunning. But the film is really asking a deeper question: why do we do this? What makes someone give their life to a sport that offers nowhere near what it should in financial reward, but demands absolutely everything?

Movement Magazine's own review drew a comparison to The Endless Summer - A film that uses travel and action as a vehicle to give the wider world a genuine insight into a way of life.

Tender was released as a limited edition 134 page hardcover book paired with the film. A thousand copies worldwide. It sold out.

Pierre Louis Costes is one of the sport's finest ambassadors, and Tender is his legacy on screen… at least for now.

👉 Watch Tender on YouTube

We covered Ben Player’s Far Nørth in depth last week in The Bodyboard Report’s edition about cold water surfing.

👉 Check it out here

Did you miss the previous publication? 👇

Sunday Funday’s special report including SIC 👇

Disclaimer: The Bodyboard Report is published for informational and entertainment purposes only. All images, media, and referenced content remain the copyright of their respective owners and are used for editorial commentary and community sharing. The Bodyboard Report does not claim ownership of any third party content.